Bells, drums & a bear that wants to be left to die

So Xi'an was the second stop of our trip through China and the city our tour guide Bing had chosen to make his home; if I'm honest I can't entirely see why. It's a fairly average, not particularly attractive city and was the first occasion we have really seen high levels of smog.

We arrived very early in the morning, but were gratefully able to book straight into our hotel, a blessing when you spent the entire previous night unable to sleep on the train. We headed into breakfast in the hotel and quickly regretted our choice, so much so that five minutes later we were sitting in Starbucks, drinking coffee and eating pastries; nearly three months had passed and we had finally succumbed to eating in western restaurants!

In the city of Xi'an the only thing to really do was visit the Bell Tower and Drum Tower and the names kind of give away what awaits you inside. Siobhán & Kirsty were in far better moods than my good self, so gave the drums a good beating whilst I looked on. The most interesting area in town was the Muslim quarter, with huge numbers of Middle Eastern restaurants and a large market where Siobhán started to practice her bartering skills, which I have to say were pretty impressive.

The real reason to be here of course was to visit the Terracotta Warriors which are situated near by. The museum, if we can call it that, is split into three main buildings, but in my opinion they take you through them the wrong way round, as the first and main building houses vast numbers of pretty intact warriors giving a very impressive impact, whilst the second two are far smaller and would work better in build up . . . Chinese Tourist Board take heed! I'm sure they'll be reading our blog ;)

After just a couple of days in Xi'an we were back on a train and heading for Chengdu. This was the mother of all train journeys, being as it was 17 hours in length and to be honest the first train seemed like luxury in comparison to this one. We helped numb the pain by spending several hours in the restaurant car drinking and playing "guess what we've ordered" as the trains are one of the few places where no one seems to speak English and the menus are solely in Mandarin.

The reason for our visit to Chengdu was to visit a Panda reserve. Now don't get me wrong, they're quite cute, particularly the half dozen babies that had not long been born, but we really should be accepting the bloody obvious, that being as a species Pandas are neither meant to or indeed seem to want to survive!

Let's look at the facts, they are biologically carniverous, but can't be arsed to eat anything other than certain kinds of bamboo, a plant to nutritionally void that they have to consume it in vast quantities. Secondly they don't like sex and even for those that can be coaxed into having a go have the unfortunate hinderance of the males being so poorly endowed that they often can't quite make it . . . definitely not a species that would be comfortable showering down the gym!
Let's not blame it all on the poor men though, the women are so unaccustomed to child birth that when they do have a child (generally by means of artificial insemination) they freak out and frequently kill the cub.

I think it's time that we let evolution prove it's worth and take this unfortunately cute species the way of so many before it . . . maybe I'll setup a new group on Facebook "We the undersigned want the Panda to die!" and wait for the death threats to start rolling in!

Anyway, rant over, next stop Mount Emei.